Living Outside The Box

The reason to do all this is about working to pioneer new methods to save the world - one ocean plankton bloom, one forest, not one discovery at a time. All at once.
This blog and my lifes work is dedicated to my 3 children and 2 grandchildren and yours too...and to mysteries of nature some discovered most not.

Nations Fight The Last Great Sea Battle Using Fishing Privateers

Subsidies paid to commercial fishing fleets by their government often pays for 60% of the fuel cost.

Without these privateers’ subsidies the world’s catch would be a fraction of what it is today.

In 2013, Kiyoshi Kimura, the owner of a Japanese sushi restaurant chain, paid $1.76 million for the first bluefin at Tsukiji, which weighed 489 pounds.

Fleets of ever larger and technologically advanced fishing boats are racing to see who can catch the last “million dollar tuna” or myriad other ocean fish before they become so rare that even with massive fuel subsidies they will be too costly to pursue. These fleets are today’s Privateers, their pirate-like crews and owners paid rich bounties by their governments to show the flag and sink the competition.

To the victor go the swaggering spoils. Nations of the world pays out $27 billion subsidizing their fishing fleets, according to a report by the Global Ocean Commission. This while the total value of the world marine catch is only $79 billion (FAO 2012 report). What other industry commands such a subsidy? All the while ocean fish populations are steadily collapsing.

There is a better way

A better use for some of this flag flying swag would be for a tiny fraction of these subsidies to fund ocean pasture restoration. Our solution is dirt cheap! For a cost of mere tens of millions per year, not the tens of billions of present industry subsidies, the job of bringing billions of additional fish back to sustainable abundance can be rapidly accomplished.

Within just a few years, we can bring back the fish and supply all of the world’s fishing fleets with an ocean restored to its former abundance. Our work of 2012 is delivering hundreds of millions for additional fish to the regions catch today. So as popular as blaming over-fishing for the decline in fish production, the real reason behind declining catch is the collapse of ocean pastures.

Like any pasture as the grass (or plankton in the oceans) disappears so does the livestock. (Dust in the wind rpt.) By restoring and reviving ocean pasture health the need for fuel subsidies will fall as fishing becomes once again a profitable free enterprise. Fishing communities will be revitalized as billions of fish swim into the nets and onto the plates of people everywhere.

We’ve proven it just works!

Bear with me here’s some of the Global Ocean Commission bad news (the good news follows).

Such fleets of highly subsidized privateer fishing companies are also rightly described in economic parlance as zombies—unprofitable companies that will surely fail without massive government aid to keep them afloat. Governments are using them to keep fish prices low and to preserve their fleets and fishermen and to have their flags flying when the last fish of the ocean fish are caught.

But at what cost to the ocean.

In the case of the global high-seas bottom-trawl fleet. The highliner nations with the top 12 catches bunker these particularly harmful monsters with $152 million a year in fuel, worth a quarter of the value of the fish they catch. Fishing deep is high cost and inefficient and these marginally economic boats typically earn a meager 10% profit. They simply could not stay in business if not for their government privateer purses.

Governments are desperately afraid of cutting bait on these fishing industry subsidies because of the feared impact on jobs and local politics. In 2006 Spain choose to keep fishing and increased its fuel subsidy by 60% when fishermen blockaded its Mediterranean ports protesting high fuel prices. But the captains and the ships lion sized share of the money didn’t go to the common fisherman. These big boats and recipients of the maximum subsidies are not typically large employers: GOC reports that the biggest vessels catch 65% of all marine fish, while employing only 4% of fishermen.

Governments of 200 years ago choose to stop paying privateers to fly their flags and wage economic war. Those pirate ships became ships of commerce. Today governments can easily afford and almost immediately restore and revive the oceans and in doing so make those zombie ships honest vessels in a world with sufficient fish for all.

How To Bring Back Billions Of Fish, Feed The World’s Hungry – Ocean Pasture Restoration Repurposes Billions Of Tonnes Of CO2 Into Ocean Life

In 2012 after many years of development work my company Ocean Pasturescompleted a commercial-scale pilot project designed to restore and replenish a vital ocean salmon pasture in the N.E. Pacific. Ocean Pastures provided the technology, methodology, and scientific and engineering expertise via a limited technology license and other guiding business agreements with the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation. It Just Works!

The fish came back we thought they were a goner.

OK so the fish really came back this fall, a year following our 2012 ocean pasture restoration in the NE Pacific. Where the official projected catch was expected to be some 50 million Pink salmon, instead the catch was 226 million fish, the largest in all of history. Now it is being reported that everywhere from Alaska to the lower 48, baby salmon that swam out to sea, instead of mostly starving were treated to a feast on newly vibrant ocean pastures where once they could neither thrive nor survive. They grew and grew and before too long they swam back to our rivers a hundred million strong. Read the rest of the story here….

For a much more detailed view of how we can bring the fish back everywhere in the world

How To Bring Back Billions Of Fish, Feed The World’s Hungry – Ocean Pasture Restoration Repurposes Billions Of Tonnes Of CO2 Into Ocean Life

From the Columbia River north to Alaska salmon returns are proving to be among best in recorded history, according to reports by Fish and Wildlife officials and confirmed by throngs of happy fishermen. Seattle Times 14 June 2014

It’s not just some lucky accident of nature.

In 2012 after many years of development work my company Ocean Pastures completed a commercial-scale pilot project designed to restore and replenish a vital ocean salmon pasture in the N.E. Pacific. Ocean Pastures provided the technology, methodology, and scientific and engineering expertise via a limited technology license and other guiding business agreements with the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation. Read the full story here…

In less time than you'd spend screwing in an energy saving light bulb you can help restore the ocean pastures by recommending to your social media friends that they should read this post.

Interesting Snippets

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact." Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

"It's like religion. Heresy in science is thought of as a bad thing, whereas it should be just the opposite." - Thomas Gold

Unnamed Law: If it happens, it must be possible.

" If you steal from one person, well they call that plagarism. I steal from everyone, they call that research. - Woody Guthrie

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. - Arthur C. Clarke's First Law

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover. - H. Poincare

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature." - Michael Faraday

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. - Max Planck

Corollary: Science advances funeral by funeral.

A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds. - Mark Twain

Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - R. George

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are that good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. - Howard Aiken

I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here ... We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped. - U.S. Senator Simon Cameron, on the Smithsonian Institute (1901)

The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who's doing it! The Roman Rule

"I never make predictions, especially about the future" - Casey Stengle